May Day, Rain Day?

By ‘C’:

After yesterday’s cold north wind, and the ‘promise’ of a month’s worth of precipitation in one day (as did happen in some parts of the country, but not where we are) today was May Day alright, but not a stormy rain day.

In fact, the only water at Green Gym this morning was in:

• the stream where we were working
• thermos flasks and mugs at tea-break

Indeed the glorious sunshine had one volunteer exclaiming out loud, “What a grand day!”

May Day was duly celebrated, but not with dancing round a maypole – nor even by any extreme Morris Dancing.  Just by tea-break treats, decorated with fruit and flowers:

Oh, and by some madcap splashing in a shallow stream, and mucking about in the mud: activities which have had many a volunteer over the years happily reminiscing that they have not had this much fun since they were a little kid.

The exercise today came in two parts.  One was to give the willow fence a ‘haircut’:

Before

Barber at work

After: "Deliberately left gently undulating"

The other was to give the vegetation in the stream a number 1.  A Chilterns chalk stream is supposed to flow crystal-clear over a natural bed of gravel.  Like so:

The trouble is, when the stream is confined by items such as road and concrete bunds,
it silts up, and all manner of extraneous vegetation starts growing there, which in turn promotes the creation of mud-flats:

We volunteers had been given the green light to “pull out anything that’s not watercress.”  Some of the target plants we could recognize: flag iris, for example; or fragrant water mint.  But with others, our attitude was a cheerful “It’s neither water nor cress, even if it looks very like cress; so it’s coming out and going to the compost heap:

As the morning wore on, we did find we had to discriminate a bit.  These kinds of items are neither water nor cress nor false cress nor compost-makings:

One of the plastic straws which have some people calling for a ban; and a soft-plastic wrap

With the warm sun on our backs, work had begun at an ambitious pace.  It slowed down after a while!

Another change was in the wheelbarrowing operation.  As the action moved further away from the access point on the bank, someone decided to fetch a third barrow and have a go at wheelbarrowing in the stream.  Yes, in it:

Getting a barrow out of the water again was not so easy:

This did, however, seem the best way of transporting the stuff.

By session end the stream was indeed in many places “running faster and free-er”: